In short, we aren’t on track to an apocalyptic extinction, and the new head is concerned that rhetoric that we are is making people apathetic and paralyzes them from making beneficial actions.
He makes it clear too that this doesn’t mean things are perfectly fine. The world is becoming and will be more dangerous with respect to climate. We’re going to still have serious problems to deal with. The problems just aren’t insurmountable and extinction level.
…Changes which will never happen and will themselves cause untold suffering and millions of deaths, so no one will ever support them.
What we need is a method that would not negatively impact human standard of living. Human expansion into space would do it; we’ll require the energy and resources up there to geoengineer in a non-stupid way and get the energy and resources to get off Exxon-Mobil’s oily cock and undo ocean acidification anyway.
So let’s do that instead. We can prevent the civil war that would erupt from climate austerity too.
We don’t have time for that.
The way I see it, we have 3 main paths
We cut everything we’re doing, go local and human powered, and adapt to conditions as they change.
Super-intelligence and/or full automation (whichever comes first, we soon get both). It makes capitalism pointless, it lets us expand into space scaling geometrically, and it tells us exactly how we can change things here to maximize habitability
We keep doing what we’re doing until the “just in time” supply chains we use to minimize costs collapse. Either the US military’s plans for this are good and we minimize loss of life, or we starve. Industries collapse immediately, and maybe we lose the ability to produce higher technology - at the very least it won’t be nearly as common. Hopefully we can still work on AI and robotics or there’s no real way out of it
Path 1 is probably not happening. Path 2 and 3 are just a race between the next revolution in technology and the climate. It’s looking pretty close right now - so doing anything to tip the scales, however slightly, is a great idea
It would take 5, maybe 10 years at most to build a Lofstrom loop making it possible to send out unmanned mining craft en masse, and then have the craft process minerals in zero g and then dump the calcium into the ocean. Furnish the magnesium into rebar and run a current theough it when it’s stuck in the deep sea. We could even build nice seasteading islands at the same time with that approach – create more living space while undoing the damage we’ve done to the oceans. Win-win.
Governments are running experiments on SSPSes now, in no small psrt because of climate change.
We absolutely can and should take the space approach now while we still have time.
Speaking of time, we can and should launch a solar shade up there to immediately stop the warming to give us the time we need to decarbonize, and clean up the oceans and forests. A solar shade will cool the Earth without the baggage and environmental problems associated with dumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere as the U.S. and EU are considering.
Of all the options, the solar shade might be the most mandatory, and would be very doable cheaply with a Lofstrom loop.
Dude - I’m really sorry, an escape hatch for the rich people who can pay to be onboard isn’t a solution. We’ve been living unsustainably - this, by definition, can’t be sustained. We need to change now so we can make that change as comfortable and human as possible; otherwise we’re going to be stuck reactively responding to each successive disaster, or crop failure, or ecosystem collapse, or climate migration wave etc.
We need to get ahead, now.
Human expansion into space is anything but that and the idea that it is is just meaningless capitalist propaganda. Human expansion into space consists of:
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Building space solar power stations (SSPSes) to beam power down to the Earth 24/7 to replace the coal plants
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Mining calcium and magnesium from the Moon and near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) to bind with the excess CO2 in th oceans to stop and reverse ocean acidification
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Mining rare-Earth elements from NEAs to mass-produce electric cars and batteries down here ln Earth to replace gas vehicles
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Build O’Neill cylinders to preserve and rebuild ecosystems in safe places where poachers will never be able to reach
Among other things.
